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The current nom de guerre of Dutch sound artist Raymond Dijkstra, Bhaavitaah Bhuutasthah, lends direction to Dijkstra’s studio of the same title and frames reference to the cross-confusion of linguistics in modern society. For the past 30 years, Dijkstra’s output has been varied yet consistent, compiling dozens of self-released albums in which he takes away the focus from the ideas behind completed musical forms, and redirects these thoughts into the hand-made process of it’s creation.

Utilizing his designated space, Dijkstra composed his recent efforts using his newly embraced medium of electronic synthesis, fusing this with his abstract system of sound reproduction using degenerated tape, natural acoustic phenomena and random percussive patterns. Thematically, “Rückkopplung” attributes this idea of feedback loops within language. The idea of how certain languages lose sight of their original roots and after centuries of words being spoken into themselves, words become foreign recreations of their original place.

As a whole, the inspiration behind Rückkopplung situates itself within the coincidentally bizarre true story in which Dijkstra experienced, as told by Dijkstra himself:

“I was selling a table harmonium. One day, I got a message from a young man who wanted to buy it. His grandmother had recently died and he wanted to play the harmonium on her funeral two days later. I sent him my address and the following day I met him at my home. He acted somewhat confused because he had just, in front of my doorstep, received a somewhat unsettling message from his mother about his grandmother...and my house.

Since the man had told his mother he would buy an instrument at my address (an old 1924 art deco house which had seen better times due to poor (no) maintenance), she wrote him a message informing him that his grandmother had lived right there, in exactly the same house for over 20 years. They were the previous tenants just before I came to live there. He told me the name of his grandmother was Faber. I knew then that the story was correct. I remember having received mail from the previous tenants the first year in my new house. The name was Faber.

And I knew an old man had died there. That was about 25 years ago. The young man and I were both speechless. We realized the strangeness of the whole situation. The young man was somehow led to my house. The same house where his grandmother had lived an important time in her life. And where her husband had died, the year before I came there.

We talked about his grandmother and I told him something about the house. He would later send me a photo of his grandparents and his mother and father, sitting in my current living room. A strange timeprint of something which had happened a few decades ago, in my house.

The next day he would play the harmonium on the funeral of his grandmother. The same harmonium he had bought at the house where his grandmother had lived.”